I recently posted a a 6-minute infographic video on wealth distribution in the USA. I know it was imbued with a fear-based mentality, but looking beyond the attitude, I find the stats inspiring. After all, my whole shtick is based on people being gullible enough to think that they personally have a chance of becoming a gazillionaire. If they realize that their own chances of becoming hugely rich are pretty slim, they might not be interested in buying my BS anymore.

Instead of viewing the top 1% like a bunch of Ferengis lusting after latinum, and instead of worrying about what wealth percentile you fall into, think instead of how you could deliver 10x, 100x, or 1000x the value you do now. After all, I bet those oil tycoons, hedge fund managers, big bank owners, and no surprise – charlatans like myself who make money off of telling people how to make money, must deliver a lot of value. On the other hand doctors, firefighters, teachers, and scientists, people who save lives and deliver real, tangible value, tend to range between poverty and upper middle class, but rarely ever become millionaires.

Also realize that the top 1% is a huge group. Planet-wide that’s about 70 million. I know that the majority of the world’s ~6.2 billion people live in poverty, especially in Africa and Asia. But hey, what can you do. And anyway, its still 3 million people if you talk about just americans. I know that means that 310 million americans are poor or middle class.. but just… shhh. My job is to make everything seem optimistic and unicorns and rainbows, so you’ll get in a good mood and may be buy some of the BS products that I’m selling.

So yeah, data, facts, and numbers have no power over you. Those pesky facts. Just ignore them and buy this B.S ‘ultimate your scam-fest’ seminar that I’m trying to sell you, or better yet, buy this overpriced desk that cost $40 to manufacture but we want to sell for ~ $200.

Today I got a call from my mother reminding me that it was her birthday and it might’ve been nice of me to send her a card. Of course, being the complete self absorbed jerk that I am, I told her that I no longer want to get any gifts from anyone nor am I ever going to send any gifts.

Many people grow up with holiday traditions that center around buying and exchanging gifts with family members. I enjoyed and appreciated this when I was younger, and I have many fond memories about it. Of course, now I’m the mighty Steve Pavlina, soon to be the leader of an interwebs cult. Now it just, uh, doesn’t ‘resonate’ with me to do anything that doesn’t feed my ego.

Of course I don’t have the guts to say it like it is, so I will just use words like ‘resonate’, to put the blame on something else.

So, from now on, whenever I’m too lazy to do something, or when I don’t get my way and I’m being a baby about it, whether its closing the forums or not sending my family any cards, I’m just going to say that it doesn’t ‘resonate’ with me. The universe / my guardian angel / the force has decided that this thing is no longer a ‘vibrational match’ for me. I mean, what’s the alternative, that I’m too lazy? That I have FLAWS? No, that certainly can’t be it. It must be the resonation thing.

Steve Pavlina announced in a blog post recently that he’s shutting down his forums. In his characteristic manner of talking a lot of fluff while not addressing anything substantive, he doesn’t say precisely why the forums are being closed.

I did a bit of research, and from looking through this and this thread, it seems like this is what basically happened:

2) Those moderators then PM’d some selected members of Steve’s forum and invited them to join the other forum. You might consider this to be spam. Personally, I’m not sure. However this is what a highly reputed member (now also banned) of Steve’s forum wrote:

I received an invitation and sent one shortly after PDforyou was founded. The invitations I knew of were supposed to essentially be a personal suggestion for who you’d like over there, not spam, quantity was definitely not the point. I visited it and posted for a while after I heard that some of the members that had stopped participating here had decided to give that a try, but after awhile I stopped participating because I found no interest in much of what was going on. I logged on a few times since to see what was up there.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that would be a problem here, any more than participating in any other forum would, or that inviting specific friends here to any other forum would. The exclusivity didn’t ever quite feel right, which was one of the reasons I left. I’m very sorry you feel hurt by this situation, Steve.

If its true that they only invited ‘friends’, and people they knew, then I don’t think it should be considered spam. If they sent PMs to strangers, then it would definitely be spam. But given that PDForYou.com is invite only, its likely that they only invited some people whom they knew well. Who knows.

3) Steve found about this, and got upset, in a fairly childish way. He decided to ban Angela and possibly some other members of the forum over this.

4) Someone made a thread asking why Angela was banned, all this came up, and presumably Steve took a lot of criticism there.

5) All this combined, with the fact that Steve doesn’t seem to want to moderate the forum, and he’s apparently upset that some people would want to join/promote another forum, has resulted in him shutting down this forum.

That’s what I can gather from looking through the forum posts on this topic. All of this also points to Steve’s very thin skin, and his lack of ability to take any criticism.

The only good thing to come out of this, is that perhaps there will be less of a cult following around him now, and less people might be falling for his quakeries like ‘intention manifestation, subjective reality’, and the ‘psychic readings’ of his ex wife. At least, there might be less of a group mentality and peer pressure to believe such nonsense.

I hope that at PdForYou.com, the traditions of censorship from Steve’s forum don’t continue, and free speech is allowed to freely discuss any topic without fear of being banned if the site owner doesn’t like what someone has to say.

Please share your comments and thoughts on why the forum was closed and whether it was a good or bad thing.

Disclaimer: Because of the rampant censorship at Steve’s forum and deleting of posts he doesn’t like, and the fact that he might decide to take his forum offline or change its URL, the links to the threads might go offline in future.

In other news, it seems that Pavlina is now changing tactics. He is now claiming that his blog post on slavery was just a joke. However, if it was, then I’m surprised that the blog post is still up with no mention whatsoever of being an April Fools’ joke? 1st April has long gone past.

Most websites/magazines which put up an April Fools joke almost always post a rebuttal the next day making it clear that the previous story was a joke. However, it is almost 10 days already, and Pavlina’s post is still up, with the only mention of April Fools’ to those who criticize him and none whatsoever to those who agree with him? His posts on the forums also seem to show that he’s quite serious about this arrangement.

Now, he has said that he is making another blog post titled ‘Help Wanted (The serious version)’ in which he will describe which parts of his blog post were a joke and which weren’t. However, he could still add a disclaimer at the end of his old post saying ‘this was a joke, wait for my new blog post where I will explain’.

My guess is, the reason he hasn’t done so, is because he wants to wait as long as possible to see if he would get any applicants for the old post.

Lets wait and see if his new blog post clears away the points I’ve raised about bypassing employment laws, exploiting the naivety/vulnerability of someone naive enough to fall for this, etc.

I’ll be sure to give an objective analysis of his new blog post here. My goal here isn’t to simply criticize Pavlina just for the sake of it. If it seems like his ‘serious’ arrangement will actually be a good deal for his ‘slaves’ rather than just exploiting them, I’ll give him full credit for that.